Sam Raimi (the Spider-Man trilogy) tackles the backstory of the greatest and most powerful wizard this side of Gandalf; that would be Oz (James Franco), who starts off as a small-time magician before landing in an enchanted land in dire need of rescuing.   

West of Memphis is one of those stories that we would like to believe can’t really be true.  

Much like Tyler Perry panders to his base, Nicholas Sparks just keeps churning out soapy affairs about couples that meet and need to overcome their dark secret pasts in order to find happy ever after together and audiences can’t seem to wait for the next installment.  

Dwayne Johnson no longer has to affix the moniker “The Rock” to his name because we all know that he’s become a rock-solid force in movies.   

I have to admit to a little critical bias here. Having grown up in the 1980s with Porky’s and Meatballs, Risky Business and the whole oeuvre of John Hughes, I’m finding it hard to get excited about any teen debauchery comedy since Project X swept through theaters because, in my estimation, that’s the new raunchy standard-bearer.  

Boasting of the presence of a producer of Paranormal Activity and Insidious, the new movie from writer-director Scott Stewart (Legion and Priest) forgoes the spiritual horrors for something more akin to the extraterrestrial.  

An extraterrestrial astronaut named Scorch Supernova (voiced by Brendan Fraser) gets trapped when he responds to an SOS from an alien planet —some third rock from its sun.  

Good old John McClane (Bruce Willis) is right back in the middle of all bad things. This time, he’s traipsing off to Russia to bring his supposedly wayward son Jack (Jai Courtney) back home, but it turns out that Jack’s the apple that hasn’t fallen far from the family tree.  

Niels Arcel, best known in the U.S. as one of the screenwriters on the original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, reteams with Rasmus Heisterberg, his partner on that film, to tackle Bodil Steensen-Leth’s novel about madness in the dawning age of enlightenment in Denmark.